Various Artists – Friends Of Old Time Music: The Folk Arrival, 1961-1965
In 1961, my two best friends were twins with left-wing parents. One of them was into folk music, and after he played me a Pete Seeger album, I was, too. I went to the library, and there was just what I wanted, three boxes of LPs called Anthology Of American Folk Music, which I brought home and played.
One of the weirdest among the many weird songs was something called “Pagan Owl” by Clarence Ashley. (Actually, it was called “Peg And Awl”, but that’s how I heard it.) When, one day, I saw that this guy was going to play New York, my friend and I went to see him. In the middle of his set, he said, “We’ve brought a young man from home to play for you. He was playing electric guitar with a rock ‘n’ roll band, but he plays the old music, too.”
Someone led this guy, who was blind, to a chair, and he announced “Black Mountain Rag”. When he finished, there was silence, the sound of a hundred guitar-pickers despairing.
As I remember, the show was presented by something called Friends Of Old Time Music, and when I saw FOTM had sponsored a Folkways album with Ashley and this young Doc Watson fellow on it, I bought it immediately. It also had the Stanley Brothers on it, and I was hooked. I was astonished that this music was still around, although in retrospect it’s no more amazing than the fact that, say, Hall & Oates are still around today; the distance between the two eras is almost exactly the same.
The difference, of course, is that these were amateur musicians coming from a very different milieu from the one its audience was living in: pre-mass media, rural, and rooted in ways that spoke to previously unarticulated needs of educated urban intellectuals.
FOTM recorded their concerts, and the 55 tracks collected here are, with two exceptions, previously unreleased. So you don’t get the Stanley Brothers’ version of “Daniel Prayed”, which forever changed the way I thought about harmony, but you do get some Mississippi John Hurt recordings that will show you why he was so beloved; lots of rough and ready Bill Monroe and Stanleys performances; cameos by utter unknowns such as McKinley Peebles, Horton Barker, and Ed Young & Emma Ramsay; and possibly the best recordings ever by such disparate characters as Dock Boggs, Jesse Fuller, and Maybelle Carter.
As the collection’s subtitle implies, the folk revival starts here. The people whose applause you hear were touched in many ways by hearing these performances. The time that birthed this music is gone, as is the time that birthed these concerts. But I’d like to think that, 45 years later, those unarticulated needs again lie dormant in a new generation. Give it a listen.